Shapiro's Gavel

Back to School!

Ilya Shapiro — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:18:13 GMT

I was on vacation the last two weeks—first in Colorado with the whole family, then in North Carolina fishing with my older sons while my in-laws took our twins to Kansas City and Kristin had the house to herself for the first time since we had kids. I had thought about posting some travel musings, but few of you want that and I’ll add some photos at the very end of this post for those who can’t get enough my family adventures. Then I thought about letting AI loose with some crazy prompt and seeing if anybody could tell it wasn’t me; I may still do that in future! But in the end, Shapiro’s Gavel took a vacation too, though anyone who wants my short-form hot takes should of course follow me on X, @ishapiro.

But now I’m back, as the dog days of summer are dwindling—as is the fallow part of the sports calendar after the World Cup where there was little going on besides an interesting Major League Baseball season where nearly all teams are still in contention for a spot in the extended playoffs (sorry, Mets). This weekend brought the return of the Premier League and the start of the Vuelta a España as aperitifs before college football kicks off. For those old enough to remember Steve Rushin’s columns in the old Sports Illustrated—which magazine taught me to write as much as fueling my passion for sports—right now I’m feeling deeply the natural rhythms of the athletic calendar.

And the school calendar too, with my boys entering fifth and third grade tomorrow, and the twins setting off on their first day of full-day preschool. We said goodbye to our last au pair a month ago, the end of another season of life.

I’m going back to school too, in the sense that my always-packed schedule of law school-heavy lectures, debates, panels, and other public-speaking events kicks off this coming week with my annual Palmetto Tour. (Most of them are sponsored by the Federalist Society, the details for which events you can see here.) Here’s the full list through the end of October, including a special invitation for the Manhattan Institute event I teased in the subtitle to this post. —IS

Aug. 25 – Charleston, SC – Supreme Court review/preview

Aug. 26 – Columbia, SC – Supreme Court review/preview

Aug.26 – Columbia, SC – U. South Carolina event on religious liberty in public schools

Aug. 27 – Greenville, SC – Supreme Court review/preview

Sept. 2 – Cleveland – Case Western Law event on Lawless

Sept. 3 – Macon, GA – Mercer Law event on free speech/DEI/antisemitism

Sept.8 – NYC – attending MI event commemorating 25th anniversary of 9/11

Sept. 10 – Washington – American U. Law School Supreme Court preview

Sept. 15 – NYC – MI book event featuring Roy Altman (see below*)

Sept.16 – Ithaca, NY – Cornell Law event on free speech/DEI

Sept. 23 – West Palm Beach – Supreme Court review/preview

Sept. 29 – LA – Loyola Law School event on Slaughter and the administrative state

Sept. 30 – Malibu – Pepperdine Law event on topic TBD

Oct. 1 – LA – UCLA Law event on topic TBD

Oct. 2 – Orange County – UC-Irvine Law event on originalism

Oct. 5 – NYC – MI Supreme Court Preview

Oct. 6 – NYC – NYU Law event on topic TBD

Oct. 6 – NYC – “Unmuted” debate on Citizens United

Oct. 7 – Arlington, VA – George Mason U. Scalia Law Supreme Court preview

Oct.13-15 – Puerto Rico – two or three events, details still being ironed out

Oct. 23 – New Haven – Yale Law conference on Media Access & Accountability

Oct.27 – Akron – U. Akron Law on free speech and DEI

Oct.28 – Cleveland – Cleveland State Law on executive power over immigration

*Please join us for a conversation with Judge Roy K. Altman and Ilya Shapiro.
Drawing on Altman's bestselling book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, Judge Altman and Ilya Shapiro will address claims of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide and examine why allegations that would face exacting scrutiny in a courtroom are so often accepted on far thinner evidence in public discourse. The evening will conclude with audience Q&A. Copies of the book will be provided.

Register: Israel on Trial — Judge Roy K. Altman in Conversation with Ilya Shapiro

Tuesday, September 15, 2026 / Upper East Side, New York City / 6:00 PM

And now, as promised, for those who can’t get enough of the Shapiro clan, some vacation photos!

Puerto Rico’s Trademark Taking Strikes Out

Ilya Shapiro — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:55:01 GMT

Roberto Clemente collected exactly 3,000 hits in his Hall of Fame career. Puerto Rico’s government collected something else from his name: roughly $15 million.

In 2021, the commonwealth enacted laws requiring motorists to pay extra for license plates and registration tags bearing Clemente’s name, image, jersey number 21, and references to his hit total. The money went into a government fund. Clemente’s sons, who have spent decades preserving and licensing their father’s trademark and humanitarian legacy, objected to the program and received none of its proceeds.

So they sued under the Lanham Act (the federal trademark statute) and the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit allowed parts of their trademark case to continue but tossed the constitutional claim. In the court’s view, the Supreme Court’s categorical rule requiring compensation when government takes property applies only to tangible property. A trademark, being “intangible,” gets sent to the legal minor leagues: the open-ended Penn Central balancing test, under which property owners rarely score.

The Supreme Court should call that distinction out, because the Constitution has never treated invisible property as a foul ball.

The Law-Dog Days of Summer

Ilya Shapiro — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:36:12 GMT

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since the Supreme Court issued its final decisions, as I traveled to several states—including California twice—to review the term and the state of our institutions. Here’s C-SPAN video of a panel I did for the National Review Institute this week, alongside Charles C.W. Cooke and Casey Mattox on the state of the Court and other institutions in the face of calls for “reform.” And of course we also had the conclusion of the World Cup, which was just an amazing experience all around, and should stick in my eight-year-old’s mind even more vividly than my first Cup memories (which didn’t include going to games) when I was eight during the 1986 tourney.

But the work continued on a variety of front, so here are the three briefs I’ve filed so far this month—more interesting to the lay reader than most, if I do say so myself—as well as a regulatory comment to the Federal Communications Commission regarding the renewal of Disney/ABC’s broadcast licenses in light of the company’s DEI programs. And stay tuned for a brief I’m filing this week regarding Puerto Rico’s appropriation of Roberto Clemente’s trademarks without paying the Clemente family! —IS

A Conservative Court, not a Trump Court

Ilya Shapiro — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:59:16 GMT

So the Supreme Court has become super-Trumpy, right? After all, it allowed the president to remove hundreds of thousands of refugees and the heads of previously independent agencies. It struck down a campaign-finance law to the benefit of the Republican Party and ruled against Hawaii’s gun regulations and Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. But are yo…

The Supreme Court’s Birthright Citizenship Ruling Leaves Trump Only Hard Choices

Ilya Shapiro — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 02:35:02 GMT

When President Trump’s birthright-citizenship order reached the Supreme Court, the smart money was that it would lose. The real question was whether the justices would take the narrow path Justice Brett Kavanaugh ultimately mapped out, or constitutionalize the whole issue.

They chose the latter. In Trump v. Barbara, a five-justice majority held that the 14th Amendment itself guarantees citizenship to children born here to parents here illegally or only temporarily. That result will be hailed as a vindication of the post-Civil War promise of equal citizenship. But the opinion is more sweeping than it needed to be and, on the originalist question, less inevitable than its defenders pretend.

For once, I agree with Kavanaugh’s middle-of-the-road approach. He would’ve invalidated Trump’s order because it conflicts with a 1940 federal law that was eventually folded into the Immigration and Nationality Act. That would’ve been a perfectly respectable way to say, “Mr. President, you can’t do this on your own. If the elected branches want to revisit these rules, Congress itself has to speak.”

Supreme Court Confirms Broad Executive Power Over Immigration

Ilya Shapiro — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:57:23 GMT

This Supreme Court term, now in its final few days, has been focused above all on executive power.

President Donald Trump has pushed the envelope of his authority, and the court has generally let him do so—except, as in the tariffs case, when he treads on clear congressional prerogatives.

And even though the justices have yet to rule on the biggest presidential-power cases on their docket—birthright citizenship and the removal of the heads of “independent” agencies—three immigration rulings this week showed their overriding emphasis on robust executive power to counteract left-wing lawfare.

A World Cup to Remember

Ilya Shapiro — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:54:28 GMT

The first World Cup I can remember was the Maradona World Cup, Mexico 1986. Canada qualified for the first time ever, so there was much excitement among the elementary-schoolers in my little town in Ontario. As well as puzzlement that this game that we’d only ever seen played by kids our age was now elevated onto a global stage. And jokes about how weird it was they weren’t playing on ice and with sticks.

But I got my passion for the World Cup from my dad, who had played semi-pro soccer in the Soviet Union. (I imagine that “semi-pro” in a communist country in the 1950s meant you were occasionally given a meal, but in any event he didn’t pursue anything athletic past his early 20s.) We’re coming up on his third yahrzeit, the anniversary of his passing, and I have brief but vivid memories of that summer 40 years ago, as he explained the history of the sport while we watched grainy footage from Estadio Azteca and other venues. I cut the tournament schedule out of the newspaper and taped it to the top of the TV, noting the scores as the games were played.

The next few World Cups reflected different seasons of my adolescence and youth. 1990 was a low-scoring affair that planted my curiosity about Italy. The United States hosted the 1994 edition, of course, but we couldn’t afford tickets or travel—in retrospect, I wonder whether I should’ve pushed my dad to road-trip to Detroit and take a chance with scalpers—and then I became busy with a formative summer in Quebec. I remember the “denim” U.S. jerseys and Roberto Baggio skying his penalty shot to allow Brazil to win, but that’s about it. In 1998, I was having a blast interning in Washington, and remember watching the final in a bar that had been taken over by Brazilians—who were sad for a moment when France won (on home soil), but then the samba resumed.

My twins—Ollie Ballie and Goalina—were born a week before the 2022 World Cup.

In 2002, I got the opportunity to go to South Korea to visit a grad-school friend and see a few games. One of those was Senegal’s stunning upset of France in the opener and another was the 3-2 U.S. upset of Portugal that heralded our run to the quart-finals. There weren’t too many Americans who made that trek, and even fewer who spoke Spanish, so I was interviewed by Telemundo (or was it Univision?) before and after the match. Then the late —reporting for Sports Illustrated—and I organized an after-party at a barbecue place whose owners didn’t speak English but thankfully had pictures on their menus. (“Forty orders of chicken and fries, please, and keep the beer flowing!”) When I got back stateside, I watched games either while running on a treadmill before work as a summer associate or at one particular bar in Arlington, Summers, which had the satellite package and stayed open at all hours of the night.

And so it went every four years. The World Cup provided a nice backdrop to the early summer in a way that was simpler than the Olympics, about which I’ve written in the past.

As we’ve discovered with the European fans who’ve gone viral in discovering the real America, it’s only partly about the soccer itself, and partly about the culture of it all. There aren’t as many political narratives as with the Olympics—no matter how much left-wing sports writers want to focus on U.S. immigration policies and the like—and everybody can beat up on FIFA’s corruption and mismanagement. Although current FIFA boss Gianni Infantino aspires to greater geopolitical influence, even creating a Peace Prize to award to Donald Trump, the International Olympic Committee’s pretense about leading a “movement” for world peace and brotherhood isn’t a great fit for what’s at base a one-sport championship.

And so we come to the tri-hosted 2026 World Cup. Months ago I had signed up for the earliest ticket lottery, ultimately securing five tickets to three games. Washington wasn’t named one of the host cities, so I had to make strategic decisions on where to go. I figured I could take one of my sons to back-to-back games in Kansas City and Texas, and then would also make a solo day-trip to Philadelphia. I made these choices before the teams were assigned to groups or cities, so it could’ve been something like Cape Verde-Saudi Arabia or Jordan-Uzbekistan. Instead, I literally won the lottery, securing Argentina-Algeria (Messi!), Portugal-DR Congo (Ronaldo!), and France-Iraq (Mbappe!). But I also got the tickets before game times were set, so ended up with an 8pm game in Kansas City followed by a noon kickoff in Houston. Logistically tough, but doable. (Had I picked Dallas instead of Houston, we would’ve ended up with a better game in England-Croatia and a more forgiving flight schedule—but we would’ve missed Charlie’s favorite player, Cristiano Ronaldo.)

That trip was this past week. Highlights from the first half include seeing my soccer-mad eight-year-old attend his first World Cup match, a multistory sporting goods emporium called Scheel’s, and, of course, Messigol (actually Messihattrick). Lowlights include a long hot line to get into FanFest and having to circumnavigate ~~Arrowhead~~ Kansas City Stadium for 2.5 hours in less-than-crawling traffic to get to my $150 parking spot—while other fans were stranded downtown or walking for miles—which FIFA’s ergonomic consultants thought was brilliant logistics I’m sure. If only Grant Wahl were around to write about his beloved albiceleste playing on the world’s biggest stage in his hometown. (He passed away while covering the 2022 World Cup.)

Highlights from the second half of the trip include: seeing the Argentine team plane at the KC airport before we flew on to Houston; watching Ronaldo run onto the field; and swimming in the hotel pool after a hot day. Lowlights include having to wake up for an early flight after that late-night game; Portugal’s performance; and a rental car whose air conditioning just couldn’t cope with “feels like 111” heat. (Houston had a torrential rainstorm followed by a convection-oven effect.)

It was good to get home Thursday afternoon, just in time to watch Canada thump Qatar 6-0, its first-ever win and more goals than in all previous World Cups combined. And then of course yesterday the USMNT—can we come up with a better nickname?—had a convincing 2-0 victory over Australia. When Paraguay beat Turkey late last night—yes, I stayed up—it meant that we had won the group for the first time since 2010 (and won the first two games for the first time since the first World Cup in 1930).

But if you’ve read this far, you likely know all that. Now we have a whole ’nother month of soccer, culminating with a final at ~~the Meadowlands~~ ~~MetLife~~ New York/ New Jersey Stadium on July 19. As it happens, I’ll be coming back from California that day, and engineered my itinerary to have a long layover in Houston on the way back, so I can watch at an airport lounge or bar rather than risking airplane internet (which is improving rapidly, but can’t chance an outage). U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

And for those interested, here are photos from our trip. Happy Father’s Day!

"It's Amazing That the Heart of Antisemitism in America Lies on Campus"

Ilya Shapiro — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:08:37 GMT

This past week I testified before the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, at a hearing entitled “Discrimination Against Jews on College and University Campuses Since Oct. 7, 2023.” I knew several members of the committee, including my Manhattan Institute colleague Rafael Mangual, and the other witness was my old friend and professional collaborator Nadine Strossen. I’d also previously served on Virginia’s Advisory Committee. So this was all very comfortable and—dare I say it—fun. Apparently the Democratic-appointed members of the committee had voted against antisemitism as a subject of study—one of them resigned in protest—and then had gone incommunicado ahead of the hearing, declining to call their own witnesses and then insisting on having their own hearing afterwards (nothing doing). Controversy! Anyhow, you can watch the raw video of the hearing here, and below are the written remarks that I submitted. —IS

Thank you for inviting me to discuss these important issues. I think we all recognize that higher education is in crisis, one thrust into the national discourse after October 7, 2023. It’s amazing that the heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, wrote soon after Hamas’s attack on Israel that, as a 70-year-old Jewish man, “never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.” [1] Some of us were less surprised, given the anti-Israel, anti-American, and generally anti-Western ideology that’s taken root in higher education.

As Bill Ackman put it in a revelatory essay posted the same day Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues.[2] It’s a leading indicator of underlying pathologies, which here means everything from cancel culture to indoctrination, intellectual corruption to moral decay. We’ve seen a subversion of the core mission of universities to seek truth and knowledge, and of classical liberal values like free speech, due process, and equality under the law. It’s been a shift from education to activism.

The root cause of all of this is a noxious postmodern ideology that contends that truth is subjective and must be viewed through lenses of race, gender, and other identity categories, according to some privilege hierarchy. Your rights and freedoms depend on whether you’re part of a class deemed oppressor or oppressed. Jews are coded as oppressors and, once that move is made, the same campuses that can detect microaggressions invisible to the naked eye suddenly become blind to students being harassed, blocked, spat on, or told that their people had it coming.

The Education of a Cook County Originalist

Ilya Shapiro — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:24:18 GMT

Randy Barnett’s Felony Review is, in one obvious sense, a sequel to A Life for Liberty: his previous book gave us the intellectual arc, while this one recovers material that couldn’t fit there and brings us down from the heights of constitutional theory to the police station, the courtroom, and the corruption-prone machinery of criminal justice. Alan Dershowitz, who taught Barnett at Harvard Law and wrote the foreword to this book, is exactly right to say that his student’s earlier work gave readers a “top-down view” of the legal system, while Felony Review lets us see it “from the bottom up.”

What makes that bottom-up view so unusual is not merely that Barnett later became a famous law professor. It’s that he first spent four years as a line prosecutor in Cook County, Chicago’s famously crooked legal world. He was not some token federal appointee parachuting in for a résumé line, but an assistant state’s attorney doing the actual work. That’s rare enough among legal academics; it’s unheard of among constitutional scholars. Barnett did more than study institutions. He lived them in their least flattering form: the drudgery, the adrenaline, the tactical lies, the moral ambiguities, and the daily need to separate real cases from garbage. Cook County wasn’t a laboratory of democracy—it was democracy’s underbelly.

The Crazy Lawsuit Against Me Was Dismissed

Ilya Shapiro — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:46:49 GMT

Shapiro’s Gavel began after a “controversial” tweet led to my suspension from Georgetown Law and a four-month “investigation” that reinstated me on a technicality, followed by my resignation because the DEI office’s report made it impossible for me to do the job I was hired for. So it came very much to my surprise just over a year ago when I got a FedEx…

Justice Thomas's Constitution

Ilya Shapiro — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:10:47 GMT

On Thursday, Clarence Thomas became the second-longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history. That milestone would be notable for any jurist. For Thomas, it marks something more: the vindication of a constitutional vision that, for decades, was caricatured as eccentric, angry, or unserious—until the Court, and the country, began catching up.

The occasion comes just as Thomas has again demonstrated why his tenure matters. Last week in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court held that Louisiana’s race-driven congressional map could not be justified by a misconstrued Voting Rights Act. As my colleague Dan Morenoff explained, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was correct in tightening Section 2 doctrine so that it no longer forces states into racial sorting. But Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurred to say what he’s said for over 30 years: Section 2 doesn’t regulate districting at all.

That’s Thomas in full. He joins the Court when it moves toward the Constitution, but doesn’t trim his sails merely because a plurality of colleagues has stopped short of first principles.

All Steak, No Sizzle

Ilya Shapiro — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:50:35 GMT

With Justice Samuel Alito in the news this week for authoring the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it’s auspicious that I have a review of my friend Mollie Hemingway’s smash new book about him. Hope you enjoy reading this piece as much as I enjoyed reading the book. —IS

Mollie Hemingway has written the rare…

The Left’s Supreme Court Pressure Campaign Heats Up Again

Ilya Shapiro — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:28:59 GMT

For progressives, every institutional norm is sacred until it stands in the way of their political goals.

Such is the case with the Left’s latest assault on the Supreme Court, a campaign of public pressure, intra-court sniping, and conveniently timed leaks, all designed to delegitimize the justices whenever the Court refuses to function as a super-legislature for the Democratic Party.

Start with Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s remarkable outburst two weeks ago. In criticizing Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she took a swipe at his “privilege,” as though a justice’s personal background somehow disqualifies him from participating in legal debate. It’s ugly stuff, more at home in a graduate seminar than among members of the nation’s highest court.

Clarence Thomas, the Constitution, and Their Critics

Ilya Shapiro — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:42:26 GMT

The easiest way to misunderstand Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent speech at the University of Texas is as a conventional swipe at contemporary progressives. His target was instead deeper and older: the capital-P Progressive challenge to the American Founding itself.

Appearing in Austin as part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas framed the issue as one of first principles. “The Constitution is the means of government,” he said, and “it is the Declaration that announces the ends of government.”

No, Trump Can’t Be Removed Under The 25th Amendment

Ilya Shapiro — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:15:44 GMT

Earlier this week I made my debut in the Daily Wire:

Calls to invoke the 25th Amendment have become a kind of political reflex — trotted out whenever opponents of a sitting president decide that sharp rhetoric, unconventional behavior, or controversial decision-making must somehow amount to incapacity. With Donald Trump, this refrain has reached predictable levels: he’s “unfit” or “unstable,” critics say, and therefore should be removed not through elections or even impeachment, but via the Constitution’s emergency mechanism for presidential disability. That argument fundamentally misunderstands what the 25th Amendment is and why it exists.

Ratified in 1967 in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the 25th Amendment was designed to address a narrow but serious problem: what happens when a president is incapable of exercising the powers of the office? Section 4, the most discussed (and most misunderstood) provision — and one that has never been invoked — allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Upon transmitting that declaration to Congress, the vice president immediately assumes the role of acting president.

Getting Canceled Never Gets Old

Ilya Shapiro — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:31:52 GMT

I was supposed to be in New York right now, speaking at the 92nd Street Y—a historic Jewish community center that has become known for its cultural programming. I knew that it had become a bastion of bien-pensant progressive virtue-signaling as befits its location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, so was intrigued when early this year I was invited t…

When the Man Comes Around

Ilya Shapiro — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:25:29 GMT

Cinema Paradiso has always been one of my favorite movies, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated new subtleties and identified with the lead character, Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita, in different ways. The tale of a successful director returning to his poor Sicilian hometown from Rome after decades away hits different when you’re pushing 50 than when yo…

Birthright Citizenship Will Remain As Is, a Live Political Issue

Ilya Shapiro — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:58:00 GMT

When President Trump left the courtroom midway through the argument in the case challenging his birthright-citizenship executive order, he was signaling what all of us following the argument were feeling: the administration was going to lose. Of course, that was the conventional wisdom going in, which is probably why Trump has been so negative on the Court, culminating in a Tuesday press conference where he announced that he’d come to the argument.

Trump’s presence was a big deal—the first time a sitting president has ever attended a Supreme Court argument—but it didn’t affect the argument. It showed how important this case is to the president’s agenda, but his policy arguments in response to historic levels of illegal immigration and birth tourism, popular as they are, didn’t seem to change any justice’s vote.

Supreme Court Invalidates State Ban on Talk Therapy for Gender Dysphoria

Ilya Shapiro — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:44:03 GMT

This morning, in a case called Chiles v. Salazar, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of licensed counselor Kasey Chiles in her challenge to a state law that prevented her from attending to her patients’ needs in the way she thought best. It’s a straightforward opinion based on viewpoint discrimination: Colorado’s law allowed an “affirming” perspective…

More Briefs in Brief

Ilya Shapiro — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:01:25 GMT

As you receive this post, I’m in the air with my older sons. Technically, spring break doesn’t start until tomorrow, but I figured that pulling my boys out of school a day early was worth their seeing me in action: I’m giving a talk on the legality of Venezuela/Iran military operations at UNLV at lunch today. It’s one of the great privileges of the unusual way I earn a living—at the intersection of the legal, political, academic, and media worlds—that I generally set my own schedule, which includes being able to take my kids on special trips during their spring break week.

Three years ago, we went all around Florida (both coasts, theme parks). Two years ago we hit Cactus League spring training and southern California (Palm Springs, theme parks). Last year, we celebrated Passover in Scottsdale before taking the Grand Canyon Railway and visiting Navajo Country. This year, we start in Las Vegas—which is actually great for kids!—before hitting Flagstaff and this time ending the trip with Passover seders in Scottsdale (where my great friend Adam Kwasman is vice mayor). We were supposed to ski/snowboard at the terrific Snowbowl resort in Flagstaff, but the poor snow conditions that have plagued the entire West this season canceled those plans last week. So we pivoted to an extra day in Vegas and then other kinds of fun activities in Arizona.

And like that privilege to make lasting memories in my personal life, my legal practice similarly provides a variety of intellectual and policy experiences. Here are the first five briefs my team and I at the Manhattan Institute filed this month, all but one of them in the Supreme Court. See you in April! —IS